
E Course OF American History 



An Address delivered at the Semi-Centennial Anniversary of the New 

Jersey Historical Society, Newark, N. J., 

May i6th, 1895. 



Bv WOODROW WILSON, Ph. D., LL D. 



I'rofessor of Jurisprudence in Princeton University. 



PATERSON. N. J.: 

THK PRKSS PKIN rlNC; ANU Pl'UI.ISHlX*; CO.. -.JfiO MAIN STUKKT. 

i8q8. 



ouRSE OF American History 



An Address deliveted ;U the Scnii-Centcunial Amiiversai-y of the New 

Jersey Historical Society, Newark, N. J., 

May i6th, 1S95. 



By WOODROW WILSON, Ph, D„ LL D 



Professor of Jurisprudence in Princeton University. 



PATEKSON. N. J.: 

THE PRESS PHINTING AND PITBLISHING CO.. 569 M.4IN STKEET. 

189S. 



.(a 
.W75 



^ , IN EXCHANGE 

JAN 21 i921 ^ 



The Course of American History. 



In the field of history learning should be deemed to 
stand among the people and in the midst of life. Its func- 
tion there is not one of pride merely: to make complaisant 
record of deeds honorably done and plans nobly exe- 
cuted in the past. It has also a function of guidance : to 
build high places whereon to plant the clear and flaming 
lights of experience, that they may shine alike upon the 
roads already traveled and upon the paths not yet attempt- 
ed. The historian is also a sort of prophet. Our memo- 
ries direct us. They give us knowledge of our character, 
alike in its strength and in its weakness: and it is so we 
get our standards for endeavour, — our warnings and our 
gleams of hope. It is thus we learn what manner of nation 
we are of, and divine what manner of people we should be. 

And this is not in national records merely. Local his- 
tory is the ultimate substance of national history. There 
could be no epics were pastorals not also true, — no patriot- 
ism, were there no homes, no neighbours, no quiet round 
of civic duty; and I, for my part, do not wonder that 
scholarly men have been found not a few who, though they 
might have shone upon a larger field, where all eyes would 
have seen them win their fame, yet chose to pore all their 
lives long upon the blurred and scattered records of a 
country-side, where there was nothing but an old church 
or an ancient village. The history of a nation is only the 
history of its villages written large. I only marvel that 
these local historians have not seen more in the stories 
they have sought to tell. Surely here, in these old ham- 
lets that ante-date the cities, in these little communities 



4 THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

that stand apart and yet give their young life to the nation, 
is to be found the very authentic stuff of romance for the 
mere looking. There is love and courtship and eager life 
and high devotion up and down all the lines of every gene- 
alogy. What strength, too, and bold endeavour in the cut- 
ting down of forests to make the clearings ; what breath of 
hope and discovery in scaling for the first time the nearest 
mountains; what longings ended or begun upon the com- 
ing in of ships into the harbour; what pride of earth in 
the rivalries of the village; what thoughts of heaven in 
the quiet of the rural church ! What forces of slow and 
steadfast endeavour there were in the building of a great 
city upon the foundations of a hamlet: and how the plot 
broadens and thickens and growls dramatic as communities 
widen into States ! Here, surely, sunk deep in the very 
fibre of the stuff, are the colours of the great story of men, 
— the lively touches of reality and the striking images of 
life. 

It must be admitted, I know, that local history can be 
made deadly dull in the telling. The men who reconstruct 
it seem usually to build with kiln-dried stuff, — as if with a 
purpose it should last ! But that is not the fault of the 
subject. National history may be written almost as ill, if 
due pains be taken to dry it out. It is a trifle more diffi- 
cult: because merely to speak of national affairs is to give 
hint of great forces and of movements blown upon by all 
the airs of the wide continent. The mere largeness of the 
scale lends to the narrative a certain dignity and spirit. 
But some men will manage to be dull though they should 
speak of creation. In the writing of local history the thing 
is fatally easy. For there is some neighbourhood history 
that lacks any large significance, which is without horizon 
or outlook. There are details in the history of every com- 
munity which it concerns no man to know again when once 
they are past and decently buried in the records; and 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 5 

these are the very details, no doubt, which it is easiest to 
find upon a casual search. It is easier to make out a list 
of county clerks than to extract the social history of the 
county from the records they have kept, — though it is not 
so important: and it is easier to make a catalogue of any- 
thing than to say what of life and purpose the catalogue 
stands for. This is called collecting facts " for the sake of 
facts themselves ;" but if I wished to do aught for the sake 
of the facts themselves I think I should serve them better 
by giving their true biographies than by merely displaying 
their faces. 

The right and vital sort of local history is the sort which 
may be written with lifted eyes, — the sort which has an 
horizon and an outlook upon the world. Sometimes it 
may happen, indeed, that the annals of a neighbourhood 
disclose some singular adventure which had its beginning 
and its ending there: some unwonted bit of fortune which 
stands unique and lonely amidst the myriad transactions of 
the wide world of affairs, and deserves to be told singly 
and for its own sake. But usually the significance of local 
history is, that it is part of a greater whole. A spot of 
local history is like an inn upon a highway: it is a stage 
upon a far journey: it is a place the national history has 
passed through. There mankind has stopped and lodged 
by the way. Local history is thus less than national his- 
tory only as the part is less than the whole. The whole 
could not dispense with the part, would not exist without 
it, could not be understood unless the part were also under- 
stood. Local history is subordinate to national only in the 
sense in which each leaf of a book is subordinate to the vol- 
ume itself. Upon no single page will the whole theme of the 
book be found; but each page holds a part of the theme. 
Even were the history of each locality exactly like the 
history of every other (which it cannot be), it would de- 
serve to be written^ — if only to corroborate the history of 
2 



6 THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

the rest, and verify it as an authentic part of the record of 
the race and nation. The common elements of a nation's 
life are the great elements of its life, the warp and woof of 
the fabric. They cannot be too much or too substantially 
verified and explicated. It is so that our history is made 
solid and fit for use and wear. 

Our national history has, of course, its own great and 
spreading pattern, which can be seen in its full form and 
completeness only when the stuff of our national life is laid 
before us in broad surfaces and upon an ample scale. But 
the detail of the pattern, the individual threads of the 
great fabric, are to be found only in local history. There 
is all the intricate weaving, all the delicate shading, all the 
nice refinement of the pattern, — gold thread mixed with 
fustian, fine thread laid upon coarse, shade combined 
with shade. Assuredly it is this that gives to local history 
its life and importance. The idea, moreover, furnishes a 
nice criterion of interest. The life of some localities is, 
obviously, more completely and intimately a part of the 
national pattern than the life of other localities, which are 
more separate and, as it were, put upon the border of the 
fabric. To come at once and very candidly to examples, 
the local history of the Middle States, — New York, New 
Jersey, and Pennsylvania, — is much more structurally a 
part of the characteristic life of the nation as a whole than 
is the history of New England communities or of the sev- 
eral States and regions of the South. I know that such a 
heresy will sound very rank in the ears of some : for I am 
speaking against accepted doctrine. But acceptance, be it 
never so general, does not make a doctrine true. 

Our national history has been written for the most part 
by New England men, — all honor to them ! Their schol- 
arship and their characters alike have given them an hon- 
orable enrolment amongst the great names of our literary 
history; and no just man would say aught to detract, were 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 7 

it never so little, from their well-earned fame. They have 
written our history, nevertheless, from but a single point of 
view. From where they sit, the whole of the great devel- 
opment looks like an Expansion of New England. Other 
elements but play along the sides of the great process by 
which the Puritan has worked out the development of na- 
tion and polity. It is he who has gone out and possessed 
the land ; the man of destiny, the type and impersonation 
of a chosen people. To the Southern writer, too, the 
story looks much the same, if it be but followed to its cul- 
mination, — to its final storm and stress and tragedy in the 
great war. It is the history of the Suppression of the 
South. Spite of all her splendid contributions to the 
steadfast accomplishment of the great task of building the 
nation; spite of the long leadership of her statesmen in 
the national counsels; spite of her joint achievements in 
the conquest and occupation of the West, the South was 
at last turned upon on every hand, rebuked, proscribed, 
defeated. The history of the United States, we have 
learned, was, from the settlement at Jamestown to the sur- 
render at Appomattox, a long-drawn contest for mastery 
between New England and the South, — and the end of the 
contest we know. All along the parallels of latitude ran 
the rivalry, in those heroical days of toil and adventure 
during which population crossed the continent, like an 
army advancing its encampments. Up and down the great 
river of the continent, too, and beyond, up the slow incline 
of the vast steppes that lift themselves toward the crown- 
ing towers of the Rockies, — beyond that, again, in the gold- 
fields and upon the green plains of California, the race for 
ascendency struggled on, — till at length there was a final 
coming face to face, and the masterful folk who had come 
from the loins of New England won their consummate vic- 
tory. 



S THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

It is a very dramatic form for the story. One almost 
wishes it were true. How fine a unity it would give our 
epic ! But perhaps, after all, the real truth is more inter- 
esting. The life of the nation cannot be reduced to these 
so simple terms. These two great forces, of the North 
and of the South, unquestionably existed, — were unques- 
tionably projected in their operation out upon the great 
plane of the continent, there to combine or repel, as cir- 
cumstances might determine. But the people that went 
out from the North were not an unmixed people; they 
came from the great Middle States as well as from New 
England. Their transplantation into the West was no 
more a reproduction of New England or New York or 
Pennsylvania or New Jersey than Massachusetts was a re- 
production of old England, or New Netherland a repro- 
duction of Holland. The Southern people, too, whom 
they met by the Western rivers and upon the open prairies, 
were transformed, as they themselves were, by the rough 
fortunes of the frontier. A mixture of peoples, a modifi- 
cation of mind and habit, a new round of experiment and 
adjustment amidst the novel life of the baked and untitled 
plain, and the far valleys with the virgin forests still 
thick upon them: a new temper, a new spirit of adven- 
ture, a new impatience of restraint, a new license of life, — 
these are the characteristic notes and measures of the time 
when the nation spread itself at large upon the continent, 
and was transformed from a group of colonies into a fam- 
ily of States. 

The passes of these eastern mountains were the arteries 
of the nation's life. The real breath of our growth and 
manhood came into our nostrils when first, like Governor 
Spotswood and that gallant company of Virginian gentle- 
men that rode with him in the far year 1716, the Knights 
of the Order of the Golden Horseshoe, our pioneers stood 
upon the ridges of the eastern hills and looked down upon 



THE COURSE OP AMERICAN HISTORY. 9 

those reaches of the continent where lay the untrodden 
paths of the westward migration. There, upon the courses 
of the distant rivers that gleamed before them in the sun, 
down the farther slopes of the hills beyond, out upon the 
broad fields that lay upon the fertile banks of the '■ Father 
of Waters," up the long tilt of the continent to the vast 
hills that looked out upon the Pacific — there were the 
regions in which, joining Vv'ith people from every race and 
clime under the sun, they were to make the great com- 
pounded nation whose liberty and mighty works of peace 
were to cause all the world to stand at gaze. Thither were 
to come Frenchmen, Scandinavians, Celts, Dutch, Slavs, — 
men of the Latin races and of the races of the Orient, as 
well as men, a great host, of the first stock of the settle- 
ments : English, Scots, Scots-Irish, — like New England 
men, but touched with the salt of humor, hard, and yet 
neighborly too. For this great process of growth by 
grafting, of modification no less than of expansion, — the 
colonies, — the original thirteen States, — were only prelim- 
inary studies and first experiments. But the experiments 
that most resembled the great methods by which we peo- 
pled the continent from side to side and knit a single pol- 
ity across all its length and breadth, were surely the ex- 
periments made from the very first in the Middle States of 
our Atlantic seaboard. 

Here, from the first, were mixture of population, variety 
of element, combination of type, as if of the nation itself 
in small. Here was never a simple body, a people of but 
a single blood and extraction, a polity and a practice 
brought straight from one motherland. The life of these 
States was from the beginning like the life of the country: 
they have always shown the national pattern. In New 
England and the South it was very different. There some 
of the great elements of the national life were long in 
preparation : but separately and with an individual distinc- 



lO THE COURSE OP AMERICAN HISTORY. 

tion : without mixture, — for long almost without move- 
ment. That the elements thus separately prepared were 
of the greatest importance, and run everywhere like the 
chief threads of the pattern through all our subsequent 
life, who can doubt? They give color and tone to every 
part of the figure. The very fact that they are so distinct 
and separately evident throughout, the very emphasis of 
individuality they carry with them, but proves their dis- 
tinct origin. The other elements of our life, various 
though they be, and of the very fibre, giving toughness 
and consistency to the fabric, are merged in its texture, 
united, confused, almost indistinguishable, so thoroughly 
are they mixed, intertwined, interwoven, like the essential 
strands of the stuff itself: but these of the Puritan and 
the Southerner, though they run everywhere \vith the rest 
and seem upon a superficial view themselves the body of 
the cloth, in fact modify rather than make it. 

What, in fact, has been the course of American history? 
How is it to be distinguished from European history? 
What features has it of its own, which give it its distinctive 
plan and movement? We have suffered, it is to be feared, 
a very serious limitation of view until recent years by hav- 
ing all our history written in the East. It has smacked 
strongly of a local flavor. It has concerned itself too ex- 
clusively with the origins and Old-World derivations of 
our story. Our historians have made their march from 
the sea with their heads over shoulder, their gaze always 
backward upon the landing places and homes of the first 
settlers. In spite of the steady immigration, with its per- 
sistent tide of foreign blood, they have chosen to speak 
often and to think always of our people as sprung after all 
from a common stock, bearing a family likeness in every 
branch, and following all the while old, familiar, family 
ways. The view is the more misleading because it is so 
large a part of the truth v;ithout being all of it. The com- 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. I I 

mon British stock did first make the country, and has al- 
ways set the pace. There were common institutions up 
and down the coast; and these had formed and hardened 
for a persistent growth before the great westward migra- 
tion began which was to re-shape and modify every ele- 
ment of our life. The national government itself was set 
up and made strong by success while yet we lingered for 
the most part upon the eastern coast and feared a too dis- 
tant frontier. 

But, the beginnings once safely made, change set in 
apace. Not only so: there had been slow change from 
the first. We have no frontier now, we are told, — except 
a broken fragment, it may be, here and there in some bar- 
ren corner of the western lands, where some inhospitable 
mountain still shoulders us out, or where men are still lacking 
to break the baked surface of the plains, and occupy them 
in the very teeth of hostile nature. But at first it was all 
frontier, — a mere strip of settlements stretched precarious- 
ly upon the sea-edge of the wilds : an untouched conti- 
nent in front of them, and behind them an unfrequented 
sea that almost never showed so much as the momentary 
gleam of a sail. Every step in the slow process of settle- 
ment was but a step of the same kind as the first, an ad- 
vance to a new frontier like the old. For long we lacked, 
it is true, that new breed of frontiersmen born in after 
years beyond the mountains. Those first frontiersmen had 
still a touch of the timidity of the Old World in their 
blood : they lacked the frontier heart. They were " Pil- 
grims " in very fact, — exiled, not at home. Fine courage 
they had : and a steadfastness in their bold design which it 
does a faint-hearted age good to look back upon. There 
was no thought of drawing back. Steadily, almost calmly, 
they extended their seats. They built homes, and deemed 
it certain their children would live there after them. But 
they did not love the rough, uneasy life for its own sake. 



12 THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

How long did they keep, if they could, within sight of the 
sea! The wilderness was their refuge ; but how long be- 
fore it became their joy and hope ! Here was their des- 
tiny cast; but their hearts lingered and held back. It was 
only as generations passed and the work widened about 
them that their thought also changed, and a new thrill 
sped along their blood. Their life had been new and 
strange from their first landing in the wilderness. Their 
houses, their food, their clothing, their neighborhood deal- 
ings were all such as only the frontier brings. Insensibly 
they were themselves changed. The strange life became 
familiar; their adjustment to it was at length unconscious 
and without effort; they had no plans which were not in- 
separably a part and product of it. But, until they had 
turned their backs once for all upon the sea; until they 
saw their western borders cleared of the French; un- 
til the mountain passes had grown familiar, and the lands 
beyond the central and constant theme of their hope, the 
goal and dream of their young men, they did not become 
an American people. 

When they did, the great determining movement of our 
history began. The very visages of the people changed. 
That alert movement of the eye, that openness to every 
thought of enterprise or adventure, that nomadic habit 
which knows no fixed home and has plans ready to be car- 
ried any whither, — all the marks of the authentic type of 
the " American " as we know him came into our life. The 
crack of the whip and the song of the teamster, the heav- 
ing chorus of boatmen poling their heavy rafts upon the 
rivers, the laughter of the camp, the sound of bodies of 
men in the still forests, became the characteristic notes in 
our air. Our roughened race, embrowned in the sun, 
hardened in manner by a coarse life of change and danger, 
loving the rude woods and the crack of the rifle, living to 
begin something new every day, striking with the broad 



THE COURSE OF AMLIUCAX HISTORY. 13 

and open hand, delicate in nothing but the touch of the 
trigger, leaving cities in its track as if by accident raiher 
than design, settling again to the steady ways of a fixed 
life only when it must: such was the American people 
whose achievement it was to be to take possession of their 
continent from end to end ere their national government 
was a single century old. The picture is a very singular 
one! Settled life and wild side by side: civihzition 
frayed at the edges, — taken forward in rough and ready 
fashion, with a song and swagger, — not by statesmen, but 
by woodsmen and drovers, with axes and whips and rifles 
in their hands, clad in buckskin, like huntsmen. 

It has been said that we have here repeated some of the 
first processes of history : that the life and methods of 
our frontiersmen take us back to the fortunes and hopes of 
the men who crossed Europe when her forests, too, were 
still thick upon her. But the difference is really very 
fundamental, and much more worthy of remark than the 
likeness. Those shadowy masses of men whom we see 
moving upon the face of the earth in the far away, ques- 
tionable days when states were forming: even those stal- 
wart figures we see so well as they emerge from the deep 
forests of Germany, to displace the Roman in all his west- 
ern provinces and set up the states we know and marvel 
upon at this day, show us men working their new work at 
their own level. They do not turn back a long cycle of 
years from the old and settled states, the ordered cities, 
the tilled fields, and the elaborated governments of an an- 
cient civilization, to begin as it were once more at the be- 
ginning. They carry alike their homes and their states 
with them in the camp and upon the ordered march of the 
host. They are men of the forest, or else men hardened 
always to take the sea in open boats. They live no more 
roughly in the new lands than in the old. The world has 
been frontier for them from the first. They may go for- 
3 



14 THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

ward with their life in these new seats from where they 
left off in the old. How different the circumstances of 
our first settlement and the building of new states on this 
side the sea ! Englishmen, bred in law and ordered gov- 
ernment ever since the Norman lawyers were followed a 
long five hundred years ago across the narrow seas by 
those masterful administrators of the strong Plantagenet 
race, leave an ancient realm and come into a wilderness 
where states have never been ; leave a land of art and let- 
ters, which saw but yesterday " the spacious times of 
great Elizabeth," where Shakespeare still lives in the 
gracious leisure of his closing days at Stratford, where 
cities teem with trade and men go bravely dight in cloth 
of gold, and turn back six centuries, — nay, a thousand 
years and more, — to the first work of building states in a 
wilderness ! They bring the steadied habits and sobered 
thoughts of an ancient realm into the wild air of an un- 
touched continent. The weary stretches of a vast sea lie, 
like a full thousand years of time, between them and the 
life in which till now all their thought was bred. Here 
they stand, as it were, with all their tools left behind, cen- 
turies struck out of their reckoning, driven back upon the 
long dormant instincts and forgotten craft of their race, 
not used this long age. Look how singular a thing: the 
work of a primitive race, the thought of a civilized ! 
Hence the strange, almost grotesque groupings of thought 
and affairs in that first day of our history. Subtile poli- 
ticians speak the phrases and practice the arts of intricate 
diplomacy from council chambers placed wiihin log huts 
within a clearing. Men in ruffs and lace and polished 
shoe-buckles thread the lonely glades of primeval forests. 
The microscopical distinctions of the schools, the thin 
notes of a metaphysical theology, are woven in and out 
through the labyrinths of grave sermons that run hours 
long upon the still air of the wilderness. Belief in dim 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 



15 



refinements of dogma is made the test for man or woman 
who seeks admission to a coinpany of pioneers. When 
went there by an age since the great flood when so singu- 
lar a thing was seen as this: thousands of civilized men 
suddenly rusticated and bade do the work of primitive 
peoples, — Europe frontiered ! 

Of course there was a deep change wrought, if not in 
these men, at any rate in their children ; and every gen- 
eration saw the change deepen. It must seem to every 
thoughtful man a notable thing how, while the change was 
wrought, the simples of things complex were revealed in 
the clear air of the New World : how all accidentals 
seemed to fall away from the structure of government, and 
the simple first principles were laid bare that abide always ; 
how social distinctions were stripped off, shown to be the 
mere cloaks and masks they were, and every man brought 
once again to a clear realization of his actual relations to 
his fellows ! It was as if trained and sophisticated men 
had been rid of a sudden of their sophistication and of all 
the theory of their life and left with nothing but their dis- 
cipline of faculty, a schooled and sobered instinct. And 
the fact that we kept always, for close upon three hundred 
years, a like element in our life, a frontier people always 
in our van, is, so far, the central and determining fact of 
our national history. "East" and "West," an ever- 
changing line, but an unvarying experience and a constant 
leaven of change working always within the body of our 
folk. Our political, our economic, our social life has felt 
this potent influence from the wild border all our history 
through. The "West" is the great word of our history. 
The "Westerner" has been the type and master of our 
American life. Now at length, as I have said, we have 
lost our frontier: our front lies almost unbroken along all 
the great coast line of the western sea. The Westerner, in 
some day soon to come, will pass out of our life, as he so 



l6 THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

long ago passed out of the life of the Old World. Then a 
new epoch will open for us. Perhaps it has opened al- 
ready. Slowly we shall grow old, compact our people, 
study the delicate adjustments of an intricate society, and 
ponder the niceties, as we have hitherto pondered the 
bulks and structural framework, of government. Have we 
not, indeed, already come to these things? But the past 
we know. We can " see it steady and see it whole;" and 
its central movement and motive are gross and obvious to 
the eye. 

Till the first century of the Constitution is rounded out 
we stand, all the while, in the presence of that stupendous 
westward movement which has filled the continent: so 
vast, so various, at times so tragical, so swept by passion. 
Through all the long time there has been a line of rude 
settlements along our front wherein the same tests of 
power and of institutions were still being made that were 
made first upon the sloping banks of the rivers of old 
Virginia and within the long sweep of the Bay of Massa- 
chusetts. The new life of the West has reacted all the 
while, — who shall say how powerfully, — upon the older 
life of the East; and yet the East has moulded the West 
as if she sent forward to it through every decade of the 
long process the chosen impulses and suggestions of his- 
tory. The West has taken strength, thought, training, se- 
lected aptitudes out of the old treasures of the East, — as 
if out of a new Orient ; while the East has itself been kept 
fresh, vital, alert, originative by the West, her blood quick- 
ened all the while, her youth through every age renewed. 
Who can say in a word, in a sentence, in a volume, what 
destinies have been variously wrought, with what new 
examples of growth and energy, while, upon this unex- 
ampled scale, community has passed beyond community 
across the vast reaches of this great continent ! 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. I 7 

The great process is the more significant because it has 
been distinctively a national process. Until the Union was 
formed and we had consciously set out upon a separate 
national career, we moved but timidly across the nearer 
hills. Our most remote settlements lay upon the rivers 
and in the open glades of Tennessee and Kentucky. It 
was in the years that immediately succeeded the war of 
1 8 12 that the movement into the West began to be a 
mighty migration. Till then our eyes had been more 
often in the East than in the West. Not only were for- 
eign questions to be settled and our standing among the 
nations to be made good, but we still remained acutely 
conscious and deliberately conservative of our Old- World 
connections. For all we were so new a people and lived 
so simple and separate a life, we had still the sobriety and 
the circumspect fashions of action that belong to an old 
society. We were, in government and manners, but a dis- 
connected part of the world beyond the seas. Its thought 
and habit still set us our standards of speech and action. 
And this, not because of imitation, but because of actual 
and long-abiding political and social connection with the 
mother country. Our statesmen, — strike but the names of 
Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry from the list, together 
with all like untutored spirits, who stood for the new, un- 
reverencing ardor of a young democracy, — our statesmen 
were such men as might have taken their places in the 
House of Commons or in the Cabinet at home as natural- 
ly and with as eas}' an adjustment to their place and task 
as in the Continental Congress or in the immortal Consti- 
tutional Convention. Think of the stately ways and the 
grand air and the authoritative social understandings of 
the generation that set the new government afoot, — the 
generation of Washington and John Adams. Think, too, 
of the conservative tradition that guided all the early his- 
tory of that government: that early line of gentlemen 



iS THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

Presidents: that Steady "cabinet succession to the Presi- 
dency " which came at length to seem almost like an 
oligarchy to the impatient men who were shut out from it. 
The line ended, with a sort of chill, in stiff John Ouincy 
Adams, too cold a man to be a people's prince after the 
old order of Presidents; and the year 1829, which saw 
Jackson come in, saw the old order go out. 

The date is significant. Since the war of 18 12, under- 
taken as if to set us free to move westward, seven States 
had been admitted to the Union: and the whole number 
of States was advanced to twenty-four. Eleven new 
States had come into partnership with the old thirteen. 
The voice of the West rang through all our counsels; 
and, in Jackson, the new partners took possession of the 
Government. It is worth while to remember how men 
stood amazed at the change: how startled, chagrined, dis- 
mayed the conservative States of the East were at the rev- 
olution they saw effected, the riot of change they saw set 
in; and no man who has once read the singular story can 
forget how the eight years Jackson reigned saw the Gov- 
ernment, and politics themselves, transformed. For long, 
— the story being written in the regions where the shock 
and surprise of the change was greatest, — the period of 
this momentous revolution was spoken of amongst us as a 
period of degeneration, the birth-time of a deep and per- 
manent demoralization in our politics. But we see it dif- 
ferently now. Whether we have any taste or stomach for 
that rough age or not, however much we may wish that 
the old order might have stood, the generation of Madi- 
son and Adams have been prolonged, and the good tradi- 
tion of the early days handed on unbroken and unsullied, 
we now know that what the nation underwent in that day 
of change was not degeneration, great and perilous as were 
the errors of the time, but regeneration. The old order 
was changed, once and for all. A new nation stepped, 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. I9 

with a touch of swagger, upon the stage, — a nation which 
had broken aHke with the traditions and with the wisely 
wrought experience of the Old World, and which, with all 
the haste and rashness of youth, was minded to work out 
a separate policy and destiny of its own. It was a day of 
hazards, but there was nothing sinister at the heart of the 
new plan. It was a wasteful experiment, to fling out, with- 
out wise guides, upon untried ways; but an abounding 
continent afforded enough and to spare even for the waste- 
ful. It was sure to be so with a nation that came out of 
the secluded vales of a virgin continent. It was the bold 
frontier voice of the West sounding in affairs. The timid 
shivered, but the robust waxed strong and rejoiced, in the 
tonic air of the new day. 

It was then we swung out into the main paths of our 
history. The new voices that called us were first silvery, 
like the voice of Henry Clay, and spoke old familiar 
words of eloquence. The first spokesmen of the West 
even tried to con the classics, and spoke incongruously in 
the phrases of politics long dead and gone to dust, as Ben- 
ton did. But presently the tone changed, and it was the 
truculent and masterful accents of the real frontiersman 
that rang dominant above the rest, harsh, impatient, and 
with an evident dash of temper. The East slowly accus- 
tomed itself to the change ; caught the movement, though 
it grumbled and even trembled at the pace; and managed 
most of the time to keep in the running. But it was al- 
ways henceforth to be the West that set the pace. There 
is no mistaking the questions that have ruled our spirits as 
a nation during the present century. The public land 
question, the tariff question, and the question of slavery, 
— these dominate from first to last. It was the West that 
made each one of these the question that it was. Without 
the free lands to which every man who chose might go, 
there would not have been that easy prosperity of life and 



20 THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

that high standard of abundance which seemed to render 
it necessary that, if we were to have manufactures and a 
diversified industry at all, we should foster new under- 
takings by a system of protection which would make the 
profits of the factory as certain and as abundant as the 
profits of the farm. It was the constant movement of the 
population, the constant march of wagon trains into the 
West, that made it so cardinal a matter of policy whether 
the great national domain should be free land or not: and 
that was the land question. It was the settlement of the 
West that transformed slavery from an accepted institution 
into passionate matter of controversy. 

Slavery within the States of the Union stood sufficiently 
protected by every solemn sanction the Constitution could 
aff"ord. No man could touch it there, think, or hope, or 
purpose what he might. But where new States were to be 
made it was not so. There at every step choice must be 
made: slavery or no slavery? — a new choice for every 
new State : a fresh act of origination to go with every 
fresh act of organization. Had there been no Territories, 
there could have been no slavery question, except by revo- 
lution and contempt of fundamental law. But with a con- 
tinent to be peopled, the choice thrust itself insistently for- 
ward at every step and upon every hand. This was the 
slavery question : not what should be done to reverse the 
past, but what should be done to redeem the future. It 
was so men of that day saw it, — and so also must histo- 
rians see it. We must not mistake the programme of the 
Anti-Slavery Society for the platform of the Republican 
party, or forget that the very war itself was begun ere any 
purpose of abolition took shape amongst those who were 
statesmen and in authority. It was a question, not of free- 
ing men, but of preserving a Free Soil. Kansas showed 
us what the problem was, not South Carolina: and it was 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 21 

the Supreme Court, not the slave-owners, who formulated 
the matter for our thought and purpose. 

And so, upon every hand and throughout every national 
question, was the commerce between East and West made 
up : that commerce and exchange of ideas, inclinations, 
purposes, and principles which has constituted the moving 
force of our life as a nation. Men illustrate the opera- 
tion of these singular forces better than questions can : 
and no man illustrates it better than Abraham Lincoln. 

"Great captains with their gans and drums 
Disturb our judgment for the hour ; 
But at last silence comes: 

These all are gone, and, standing like a tower, 
Our children shall behold his fame, 
The kindly-eainest, brave, foreseeing man, 
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise not blame, 
New birth of our new soil, the first American." 

It is a poet's verdict ; but it rings in the authentic tone 
of the seer. It must also be the verdict of history. He 
would be a rash man who should say he understood Abra- 
ham Lincoln. No doubt natures deep as his, and various 
almost to the point of self-contradiction, can be sounded 
only by the judgment of men of a like sort, — if any such 
there be. But some things we all may see and judge con- 
cerning him. You have in him the type and flower of 
our growth. It is as if Nature had made a typical Amer- 
ican, and then had added with liberal hand the royal qual- 
ity of genius, to show us what the type could be. Lin- 
coln owed nothing to his birth, everything to his growth: 
had no training save what he gave himself; no nurture, but 
only a wild and native strength. His life was his schooling, 
and every day of it gave to his character a new touch of 
development. His manhood not only, but his perception 
also, expanded with his life. His eyes, as they looked more 
and more abroad, beheld the national life, and compre- 
hended it: and the lad who had been so rough-cut a pro- 
4 



23 THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

vincial became, when grown to manhood, the one leader in 
all the nation who held the whole people singly in his 
heart: — held even the Southern people there, and would 
have won them back. And so we have in him what we 
must call the perfect development of native strength, the 
rounding out and nationalization of the provincial. An- 
drew Jackson was a type, not of the nation, but of the 
West. For all the tenderness there was in the stormy 
heart of the masterful man, and staunch and simple loy- 
alty to all who loved him, he learned nothing in the East; 
kept always the flavor of the rough school in which he 
had been bred : was never more than a frontier soldier and 
gentleman. Lincoln differed from Jackson by all the 
length of his unmatched capacity to learn. Jackson could 
understand only men of his own kind ; Lincoln could under- 
stand men of all sorts and from every region of the land : 
seemed himself, indeed, to be all men by turns, as mood 
succeeded mood in his strange nature. He never ceased 
to stand, in his bony angles, the express image of the un- 
gainly frontiersman. His mind never lost the vein of 
coarseness that had marked him grossly when a youth. 
And yet how he grew and strengthened in the real stuff of 
dignity and'greatness : how nobly he could bear himself 
without the aid of grace ! He kept always the shrewd and 
seeing eye of the woodsman and the hunter, and the flavor 
of wild life never left him : and yet how easily his view 
widened to great affairs: how surely he perceived the 
value and the significance of whatever touched him and 
made him neighbor to itself! 

Lincoln's marvellous capacity to extend his comprehen- 
sion to the measure of what he had in hand is the one dis- 
tinguishing mark of the man : and to study the develop- 
ment of that capacity in him is little less than to study, 
where it is as it were perfectly registered, the national life 
itself. This boy lived his youth in Illinois when it was a 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 23 

frontier State. The youth of the State was coincident 
with his own: and man and his State kept equal pace in 
their striding advance to maturity. The frontier popula- 
tion was an intensely political population. It felt to the 
quick the throb of the nation's life, — (or the nation's life 
ran through it, going its eager way to the westward. The 
West was not separate from the East. Its communities 
were every day receiving fresh members from the East, and 
the fresh impulse of direct suggestion. Their blood 
flowed to them straight from the warmest veins of the 
older communities. More than that, elements which were 
separated in the East were mingled in the West; which 
displayed to the eye as it were a sort of epitome of the 
most active and permanent forces of the national life. In 
such communities as these Lincoln mixed daily from the 
first with men of every sort and from every quarter of the 
country. With them he discussed neighborhood politics, 
the politics of the State, the politics of the nation, — and 
his mind became travelled as he talked. How plainly 
amongst such neighbors, there in Illinois, must it have be- 
come evident that national questions were centring more 
and more in the West as the years went by : coming as it 
were to meet them. Lincoln went twice down the Missis- 
sippi, upon the slow rafts that carried wares to its mouth, 
and saw with his own eyes, so used to look directly and 
point-blank upon men and affairs, characteristic regions of 
the South. He worked his way slowly and sagaciously, 
with that larger sort of sagacity which so marked him all his 
life, into the active business of State politics ; sat twice in 
the State legislature, and then for a term in Congress, — his 
sensitive and seeing mind open all the while to every turn 
of fortune and every touch of nature in the moving affairs 
he looked upon. All the while, too, he continued to can- 
vass, piece by piece, every item of politics, as of old, with 
his neighbors, familiarly around the stove, or upon the cor- 



24 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 



ners of the street, or more formally upon the stump; and 
kept always in direct contact with the ordinary views of 
ordinary men. Meanwhile he read, as nobody else around 
him read, and sought to gain a complete mastery over 
speech, with the conscious purpose to prevail in its use : 
derived zest from the curious study of mathematical proof, 
and amusement as well as strength from the practice of 
clean and naked statements of truth. It was all irregular- 
ly done, but strenuously, with the same instinct through- 
out, and with a steady access of facility and power. There 
was no sudden leap for this man, any more than for other 
men, from crudeness to finished power, from an under- 
standing of the people of Illinois to an understanding of 
the people of the United States. And thus he came at 
last, with infinite pains and a wonder of endurance to his 
great national task with a self-trained capacity which no 
man could match, and made upon a scale as liberal as the 
life of the people. You could not then set this athlete a 
pace in learning or in perceiving that was too hard for 
him. He knew the people and their life as no other man 
did or could : and now stands in his place singular in all 
the annals of mankind, the " brave, sagacious, foreseeing, 
patient man " of the people, " new birth of our new soil, 
the first American." 

We have here a national man presiding over sectional 
men. Lincoln understood the East better than the East 
understood him or the people from whom he sprung: and 
this is every way a very noteworthy circumstance. For 
my part, I read a lesson in the singular career of this great 
man. Is it possible the East remains sectional while the 
West broadens to a wider view? 

' ' Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines ; 
By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs," 

is an inspiring programme for the woodsman and the 
pioneer; but how are you to be brown-handed in a city 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 2^ 

office? What if you never see the upright pines? How 
are you to have so big a purpose on so small a part of the 
hemisphere? As it has grown old, unquestionably, the 
East has grown sectional. There is no suggestion of the 
prairie, in its city streets, or of the embrowned ranchman 
and farmer in its well-dressed men. Its ports teem with 
shipping from Europe and the Indies. Its newspapers run 
upon the themes of an Old World. It hears of the great 
plains of the continent as of foreign parts, which it may 
never think to see except from a car window. Its life is 
self-centred and selfish. The West, save where special in- 
terests centre (as in those pockets of silver where men's 
eyes catch as it were an eager gleam from the very ore it- 
self) : the West is in less danger of sectionalization. Who 
shall say in that wide country where one region ends and 
another begins, or, in that free and changing society, where 
one class ends and another begins? 

This, surely, is the moral of our history. The East has 
spent and been spent for the West: has given forth her 
energy, her young men and her substance, for the new 
regions that have been a-making all the century through. 
But has she learned as much as she has taught, or taken as 
much as she has given? Look what it is that has now at 
last taken place. The westward march has stopped, upon 
the final slopes of the Pacific ; and now the plot thickens. 
Populations turn upon their old paths; fill in the spaces 
they passed by neglected in their first journey in search of 
a land of promise; settle to a life such as the East knows 
as well as the West, — nay, much better. With the change, 
the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer 
groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be 
known; and the time has come for the East to learn in 
her turn: to broaden her understanding of political and 
economic conditions of the scale of a hemisphere, as her 
own poet bade. Let us be sure that we get the national 



20 THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

temperament; send our minds abroad upon the continent, 
become neighbors to all the people that live upon it, and 
lovers of them all, as Lincoln was. 

Read but your history aright, and you shall not find the 
task too hard. Your own local history, look but deep 
enough, tells the tale you must take to heart. Here upon 
our own seaboard, as truly as ever in the West, was once 
a national frontier, with an elder East beyond the seas. 
Here, too, various peoples combined, and elements sep- 
arated elsewhere effected a tolerant and wholesome mix- 
ture. Here, too, the national stream flowed full and 
strong, bearing a thousand things upon its currents. Let 
us resume and keep the vision of that time: know our- 
selves, our neighbors, our destiny, with lifted and open 
eyes: see our history truly, in its great proportions: be 
ourselves liberal as the great principles we profess; and so 
be a people who might have again the heroic adventures 
and do again the heroic work of the past. 'Tis thus we 
shall renew our youth and secure our age against decay. 



OF CONGRESS 

iH 

011. ^^' 



